We Now Have a Number

A week ago, I mentioned that the FDA had intends to ban non-compete clauses.

Well, someone has run the numbers, and it looks like this rule could increase wages by about $300 billion.

According to the FTC, there are about 30 million people covered by these agreements, which means that the pay difference would be about $10,000 each for those effected.

That is not chump change:

“You’re not really free if you don’t have the right to switch jobs or choose what to do with your labor,” Lina Kahn, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, wrote earlier this month. But thanks to noncompete clauses that ban employees from working for similar businesses if they leave their jobs, that is the reality for millions of Americans. Under Khan, the FTC wants to eliminate that practice. On January 5, the agency, which is responsible for regulating businesses so they don’t engage in unfair and uncompetitive practices, announced a proposed rule that would make noncompete clauses illegal.

“Non-union workers have one source of power with respect to their employers, and it is their ability to quit,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “The only thing they have is the ability to say, ‘If you’re not paying a competitive wage, I’m just going to go somewhere else.’” Even if they don’t leave, it often takes a credible outside offer to get an employer give someone a raise.

Noncompetes erase workers’ power to improve their incomes, then, by removing the best card they can play. Having that power back would be significant. The FTC has estimated that its proposed ban, if enacted, will raise wages by nearly $300 billion a year. Evan Starr, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who has studied noncompetes, argues that this is a low estimate, because when firms can no longer game a patchwork of state laws to keep using them, the impact may be even larger than past studies have found.

Non-compete agreements are wage theft.  That's their effect, and that is there purpose.

Gee, Insider Trading Much?

Peter Thiel, right-wing nutjob, PayPal founder, billionaire, investor, and literal vampire, ended his 8-year investment in Bitcoin just before everything imploded. (behind paywall)

I'm thinking that he had information from insiders about the upcoming problems, and got out before the shit hit the fan.

Information from insiders, what is the term for that?

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, closed almost all of its eight-year bet on cryptocurrencies shortly before the market began to crash last year, generating about $1.8bn in returns.

The San Francisco-based fund made its first investment in bitcoin in early 2014 and went on to invest large sums in crypto. About two-thirds of its overall investment was used to buy bitcoin, said people close to the fund.

Founders Fund sold out of the vast majority of its entire cryptocurrency portfolio by the end of March 2022 — before the digital assets market became swept up in a crisis in May last year, said one of the people close to the fund.

The fund currently has no significant exposure to cryptocurrencies, the people said. The winding-down of its crypto bet has not previously been reported. Founders Fund declined to comment.

Thiel, a big backer of Republican candidates and a supporter of former US president Donald Trump, was one of the earliest mainstream investors to buy large sums of bitcoin and has subsequently been loudly bullish on the digital currency.

Pump and dump, and trading on insider information?

When does the crap end up warranting an indictment?

Tweet of the Day

#ITradedMyTeslaFor something safer. pic.twitter.com/GUpmDT17kZ

— Dooboofay.og (@ALPacaUrfudge) January 20, 2023

The Hashtag #ITradedMyTeslaFor something safer is trending, and this is what someone posted.

This is both funny as hell, and a sick burn.

Cue Inspector Renault

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! To find that gambling is going on this establishment

Gee, after an incredibly thorough investigation, investigators at the Supreme Court are unable to figure out how the Dobbs decision, which reversed Roe v. Wade.

Of they left no stone unturned, except, of course, for actually questioning the justices.

They did not do that, because ……… They were afraid of catching the perpetrator? **cough** Samuel Alito **cough** 

Once it became likely that Alito was the leaker, the investigation was soft pedaled:

Today the embattled institution known as the Supreme Court released a report on its investigation into the leaked draft of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The report “concludes” that the court is “unable to determine at this time, using a preponderance of the evidence standard, the identity of the person(s) who disclosed the draft majority opinion.”

We used air quotes because this report is far from conclusive, as it appears the investigators did not question the nine justices themselves. Those justices include Sam Alito, who allegedly leaked a birth control opinion in 2014, and Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni is a conservative activist who tried to overturn the 2020 election of Joe Biden.

Legal journalist Chris Geidner highlighted that on page 3, the report says: “The investigation focused on Court personnel—temporary (law clerks) and permanent employees—who had or may have had access to the draft opinion during the period from the initial circulation until the publication by Politico.” Law clerks and other employees were even asked to hand over their cell phones, as described on page 13.

………

But on page 11, the investigators acknowledge that it wasn’t only employees who had access to sensitive documents, emphasis ours: “The investigators determined that in addition to the Justices, 82 employees had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft opinion.”

Everyone knows who did this, and it was not Colonel Mustard with a candlestick.

It's Thursday, So

We have the weekly jobs report, with initial unemployment claims falling by 15,000 to 190,000, the lowest number in about 9 months, and the 4-week moving average fell as well.

I still think that the seasonal adjustments need to be adjusted to the new post-Covid normal, so YMMV.

More significantly, continuing claims ticked up by 20,000 to 1.65 million.

Meanwhile, the Fed's Beige Book, a survey of business sentiment, came out, and businesses are getting more pessimistic, which would imply a reduction in capital investment and inventories, which would slow the economy.

Retail sales fell 1.1% from November, though they still increased 6.6% year over year, which continues to point to a slowdown as well.

On the good news side, producer prices rose by the slowest pace in over a year, which hopefully means that the Fed will be less inclined to raise rates.

My not-particularly-educated guess is that we will see a depression in the next 2-3 months, though, economic statistics being what they are, it won't be called such until September.

This is All About Marketing

Germany and the US are having a dispute over sending Leopard tanks to the Ukraine.

The dispute is that the Germans are unwilling to send their Leopard 2s to the Ukraine unless the US sends M-1 Abrams tanks to the Ukraine as well.

This has nothing to do with the diplomatic or military considerations, and it has everything to do with marketing.

The Germans recall the pictures from Syria where Leopard 2 tanks operated by the Turkish army suffered heavy casualties, a number of the tanks "brewing up."

This was an older model of the tank, and it was deployed poorly, but it was still a major embarrassment.

If the Ukrainians deploy either the Leopard 2 or the Abrams against a near-peer adversary like Russia, particularly when operated by a force that lacks the training and infrastructure to operate them properly like the Ukrainians.  (They will for example have to train loaders for the NATO tanks, their current inventory uses auto-loaders)

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met his newly appointed German counterpart on Thursday for talks that took on greater urgency after Berlin put conditions on tank deliveries to Ukraine.

In a call this week with President Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz indicated that in order for Germany to unlock a package of Leopard 2 tanks for Ukraine, Washington should send tanks, too, according to a German and a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversation.

It’s a move Washington doesn’t want to make, citing the high fuel consumption and maintenance burden of the U.S. military’s M1 Abrams battle tanks. Austin was hoping to break the deadlock in Berlin and persuade Germany to send tanks, according to a senior U.S. defense official.

As the manufacturer of the Leopard 2, Germany’s approval is technically required for any country in Europe to send those tanks on to Kyiv. But as frustrations mounted, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki threatened Wednesday night to send the 14 tanks Poland has promised — regardless of whether Germany approves.

While the Abrams does consume 3-5 times more fuel than the Leopard 2, but the operation of the other subsystems are roughly equivalent.

They both have similar issues with their impact on roads and bridges, and their maintenance requirements are similar.

This is all about merciless merchants of death being worried about the PR implications of seeing their tanks blown up on YouTube.

I'm Feeling Old

David Crosby of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, has died at age 81.

But Keith Richards abides.

We Are Fucked

Before there was Covid-19, there was SARS 20 years ago.

SARS was a Coronavirus very similar to Covid-19, but it had faster symptom onset, and was less contagious, so the world public health system managed to contain it fairly quickly.

It was similar in more ways than one.  We now have Long-Covid, and we have people today who still suffering from Long-SARS.

Given the percentages of Long-Covid, the disability numbers down the road are likely to be very grim: 

In 2002–03, a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus caused a pandemic. It was described as a novel virus, meaning that it seemed to be unrelated to other viruses directly. Worldwide there were approximately 8000 cases and over 800 deaths. Toronto (Ontario, Canada) had the largest outbreak outside of Asia, with 251 cases and 41 deaths, with health care workers making up 43% of the cases.

Covid

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recorded about 500 million Covid-19 cases and 6 million deaths globally, up to mid-April 2022 [2]. How many people have suffered from Long Covid [also called post acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC)]? We have both too much evidence and insufficient evidence. There are many, many articles published. There is incomplete agreement as to criteria for inclusion, symptoms, severity of symptoms and length of time symptoms have persisted. There is the question of what proof of Covid is required (is a self-reported test adequate?) and whether the study setting is in the community or whether it is post hospitalization. In the UK, the official register provides a prevalence of ongoing post-Covid symptoms at about 8% of cases (1.8 million people [3] post 22.3 million cases [4]). A recent Lancet preprint [5] (i.e. preliminary, not yet accepted for publication and without peer review) systematic review and meta-analysis including 196 studies and 120,970 participants showed that long COVID may affect more than half of the patients, after a median of 6 months from the diagnosis. It is expected that with time, the exact numbers will become more clear. However, it is now already clear that the numbers are very significant. To deal with those staggering numbers of people with ongoing Long Covid symptoms, innumerable rehabilitation programs have sprung up. However, since Long Covid is new, there is no knowledge as to what:

• Makes a good rehab program for this population;

• What is cost-effective;

• What services are needed and helpful;

• What are the short-term and long-term outcomes with and without rehabilitation?

These questions cannot yet be answered. However, if as seems likely, Long Covid is similar to the long-term outcomes post SARS, then predictions can be made. Since the term ‘Long Covid’ seems to have taken hold, I will retrospectively refer to the collective symptoms post 2003 as ‘Long SARS’. It should be noted that all the Long SARS patients in my experience were ‘severe’, as all our patients were very sick, hospitalized and many went through the ICU. The literature on Long Covid includes all levels of severity from asymptomatic to fatal. Severity of illness has not yet been established as a risk for Long Covid but it remains as a possibility.

………

It is clear that Long SARS (post SARS ongoing symptomatology) exists, persists (apparently permanently) and can be devastatingly life-changing for some. Sufficient similarities exist between Long SARS and Long Covid (PASC) in symptoms, findings and course over time (so far) that one can predict that it is very highly likely that some Long Covid disability will persist permanently. For those interested in rehabilitation, it is once more noted that the peer group support was very highly valued by the patients. Those wishing to treat Long Covid remotely (such as with telehealth) should consider this. All of the foregoing information is provided as a personal opinion to help guide treatment and counseling, so as to provide hope but not false hope for those affected by Long Covid.

Long SARS is often permanent.

SARS and Covid are not the same.  SARS was much more virulent, with a mortality rate about 5 times that of Covid, and it would not be unreasonable to assume that the occurrence of long term disability would be less likely with Covid-19 as well.

On the other hand, Covid-19 has infected something on the order of ½ million times more people than SARS, so the aggregate numbers are likely to dwarf what was seen with SARS.

I could be wrong about this, I am not a doctor, nor am I a public health professional, I am an engineer, dammit,* so these are musings largely unsupported by anything beyond my inclination to see patterns and my experience working in healthcare and designing medical equipment.

Still, the societal impact of hundreds of millions of people worldwide having a long term disability, along with higher mortality rates from things like heart disease, kidney failure, and diabetes looks to be an enormous challenge in the long term.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

I am Amused

Much like her predecessor Andrew "Rat Faced Andy" Cuomo, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is determined to hamstring the state Democratic Party, probably because it empowers the governor (particularly a conservative Democrat) and disempowers the legislature.

Cuomo tried to keep the State Senate in Republican, and Hochul appears to be determined to keep the Court of Appeals, which despite the name is the highest court in the State of New York, in conservative hands to do the same.

She nominated Hector LeSalle to be the next chief justice, and he has a long record of being anti-abortion, anti-union, anti-defendant, and anti-civil rights, which makes him a perfect pick for Hochul. (Seriously, his record is positively horrific.)

Of course, the nomination has to be approved by the State Senate, and the Senate Judiciary Committee just voted to reject his nomination, which means that his nomination is dead, probably.

Hochul has implied that she will sue in an attempt to get a floor vote, claiming that the, "Advice and consent of the Senate," mentioned in the state constitution demands this, which to my mind is a rather bizarre reading of the state constitution.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s embattled nominee to become New York State’s top judge was rejected on Wednesday, an unprecedented repudiation that underscored a deep division among Democrats on the direction of the state’s judicial system.

After a combative hourslong hearing, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 10-9 against the nomination of Justice Hector D. LaSalle, whose nomination was strongly opposed by progressives who saw him as too conservative.

The committee’s rejection — the first time that New York lawmakers have voted against a governor’s choice for chief judge — laid bare how vulnerable Ms. Hochul, a Buffalo-area Democrat, may be to a challenge from her own party. All 10 senators who voted against the judge were Democrats; two Democrats voted in favor of Justice LaSalle, while one Democrat and all six Republicans on the committee voted in favor “without recommendation.”

The rejection does not necessarily mean that the LaSalle saga is over. The governor has not ruled out taking legal action to force a vote on Justice LaSalle’s nomination on the full Senate floor, raising the specter of a constitutional showdown.

Given the amount of flak that Hochul has gotten over this, and given that she has gone to the mat for LaSalle anyway, I do expect steps to be taken by the Governor to force a floor vote.

I do not know how this will end, but hopefully Hochul, and LaSalle, end up losing.

Nothing Shows Desperation Like

The Mayor of Chicago sending out emails to teachers to pressure them to get their students to work for her campaign.

Lori Lightfoot, who if anything might be more unpopular than Rahm Emanuel had her campaign send, "An email to Chicago Public Schools teachers Wednesday asking them to encourage their students to volunteer to help Lightfoot win a second term as mayor – and earn class credit."

Once this went public, her campaign backpedaled so fast it left skid marks.

………

It was unclear how many Chicago teachers received the email from Megan Crane, whose LinkedIn page identifies her as the deputy campaign manager for Lightfoot. The message was sent to teachers’ official work email accounts, which end in cps.edu.

………

ess than two hours later, Lightfoot’s campaign issued a third version of the statement:

“All [Lightfoot for Chicago] campaign staff have been reminded about the solid wall that must exist between campaign and official activities and that contacts with any city of Chicago, or other sister agency employees, including CPS employees, even through publicly available sources is off limits. Period.”

As mayor of Chicago, Lightfoot appoints not only the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools but also the members of the Chicago Board of Education. Chicago’s ethics ordinance prohibits the use of public resources, including email accounts, for non-official purposes.

I don't know if she will lose reelection, but it looks like her campaign is not particularly confident.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

So, the serial liar, conman, and dog murderer is now a ……… Drag queen Republican?

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

I conducted my interview with Eula along with a translator—a friend of mine from Brazil—so the responses I’m sharing are English translations from Portuguese.

Eula says she met Santos when he was 16 or 17 years old and became friends because they were both gay and enjoyed drag.

— Marisa Kabas (@MarisaKabas) January 18, 2023

This guy is the gift who keeps giving, at least for Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, James Corden, etc.

January is the weirdest fucking month.

Republican Family Values

Judges are unamused when defendants claim political bias in response to minor sex trafficking in an attempt to evade criminal responsibility.

Major Minnesota Republican campaign donor Anton Lazzaro just discovered this:

A federal judge on Friday rejected the latest plea, this time in a letter sent to his chambers, from Minneapolis GOP donor Anton Lazzaro to reconsider his child sex trafficking case now set for a March trial.

In a letter this month to Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, Lazzaro repeated his argument that he was being selectively prosecuted by the government, claiming that his was the only one among hundreds of commercial sex trafficking cases in Minnesota to be pursued in federal court and not in state court — where the potential sentences are far less severe — in recent years.

Schiltz, who previously ruled against all of Lazzaro's efforts to have charges dismissed, responded Friday that he does not accept pro se —meaning "on one's own behalf"— motions or memos from defendants who already have attorneys representing them. Schiltz previously adopted a magistrate judge's recommendation that charges not be dismissed, in part because Lazzaro failed to prove that the government singled him out while ignoring other similar cases.

"Your selective prosecution motion has been fully litigated. I have made my ruling. I understand that you disagree with my ruling, and you will have the chance to ask the Eighth Circuit [Court of Appeals] to reverse my ruling if and when you are convicted," Schiltz wrote Friday. "At this point, however, we are going to move forward with trial. I am not going to hear more argument or evidence on this issue."

Lazzaro has been held in Sherburne County jail and awaiting a trial now scheduled for March 20 on a 10-count indictment that accuses him of a conspiracy to pay numerous teenage girls for sex. To date, Lazzaro has unsuccessfully sought to dismiss the indictment on grounds including selective prosecution and arguments that the government improperly listened to jail phone call recordings with attorneys.

So a GOP operative was  ……… Dare I say it? ……… Grooming underage girls?

Gee, maybe the assertions of morality by Republicans are all just guilt and projection?

Then again, what do I know, I'm an engineer, not a social psychologist, dammit!*

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

This is My Shocked Face

Color me unsurprised that YouTube algorithms deliver conservative content.

This is not a surprise.  Misery, resentment, and rage boost engagement, and conservatism is built on misery, resentment, and rage:

YouTube's recommendation algorithm not only gently traps viewers in mild echo chambers, it is more likely to suggest conservative-leaning videos regardless of your political alignment.

That's according to a study out of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMP) that was highlighted this month by Brookings.

Social networks live and die by their recommendation algorithms: they're designed to keep visitors on the sites and apps by feeding them content that keeps them hooked, and if that drives up engagement – sharing links with others, commenting, subscribing, upvoting, etc – all the better. Controversial or mind-blowing material is perfect for this, as it's likely to spark more shares and comments, and thus keep more people addicted.

These feeds are thus personalized to each netizen based on their interests; that's essential to drawing and locking them in. Echo chambers form where people post and share stuff they have a common interest in, and ignore anything contrary to those principles and attitudes. This leads to a positive feedback loop of engagement within the group, reinforcing beliefs and increase time – and ad views – within the app or website.

The algorithms used by social media is extremely, and deliberately, harmful.  It's like Love Canal, with cat pix.

I am Completely Stoked About This

They are rebooting the "Max Headroom" series with Matt Frewer! If they bring back Amanda Pays too, I will be in ecstasy.

A 1980s pop culture mainstay is plotting a comeback. AMC Networks is developing a Max Headroom drama series reboot, with Matt Frewer set to reprise his role as the world’s first artificial intelligence TV personality. Halt and Catch Fire co-creator Christopher Cantwell is writing the adaptation and is attached as showrunner for the project, which is produced by Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah’s SpectreVision and All3Media.

Sweet!!

Where's the Money in That?

Over at The Washington Post, I saw an article referring to a paper on, "Bridging Systems," an algorithm which would promote unity rather than division.

From the abstract:

Divisiveness appears to be increasing in much of the world, leading to concern about political violence and a decreasing capacity to collaboratively address large-scale societal challenges. In this working paper we aim to articulate an interdisciplinary research and practice area focused around what we call bridging systems: systems which increase mutual understanding and trust across divides, creating space for productive conflict, deliberation, or cooperation. We give examples of bridging systems across three domains: recommender systems on social media, software for conducting civic forums, and human-facilitated group deliberation. We argue that these examples can be more meaningfully understood as processes for attention-allocation (as opposed to “content distribution” or “amplification”), and develop a corresponding framework to explore similarities — and opportunities for bridging — across these seemingly disparate domains. We focus particularly on the potential of bridging-based ranking to bring the benefits of offline bridging into spaces which are already governed by algorithms. Throughout, we suggest research directions that could improve our capacity to incorporate bridging into a world increasingly mediated by algorithms and artificial intelligence.

This is all well and good, but the economic model of all of the social media sites is to encourage outrage, because outrage = engagement = profit.

This is why Instagram turned a new father's baby pictures into a horror show, bombarding his timeline with sick and injured infants, because that encouraged engagement.

When my son was born last year, friends from all over wanted to share in my joy. So I decided to post a photo of him every day on Instagram.

Within weeks, Instagram began showing images of babies with severe and uncommon health conditions, preying on my new-parent vulnerability to the suffering of children. My baby album was becoming a nightmare machine.

This was not a bug, I have learned. This is how the software driving Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and lots of other apps has been designed to work. Their algorithms optimize for eliciting a reaction from us, ignoring the fact that often the shortest path to a click is fear, anger or sadness.

This is not a lack of the appropriate technology, this is a deliberate policy of hurting their customers (really their product to advertisers) to keep them on the site clicking on ads.

Designing a more humane algorithm is easy.  Absent government action, it will never be used. 

Doing so would involve leaving money on the table, and the principle of shareholder value demands it.

The for-profit publicly held corporation is a monster by design.

Softbank, AGAIN!

We have internet finance company Clearco is imploding.  Rather unsurprisingly, it has backing from Softbank, whose investment model appears to be to dump tons of money on an unlikely business plan, create a, "Unicorn," and then get cash out in an IPO before the whole rotten edifice collapses. (See WeWork, Uber, FTX, DoorDash, etc.)

Clearco's model was to serve as a loan shark to nascent online businesses.  Their thing was to , "The platform uses an AI system to connect to a potential client's payment, ad and e-commerce platforms to analyze their business' financial health and revenue. The platform then reviews the data and automates the diligence process, effectuating funding decisions within minutes," which is a good candidate for bullshit bingo winner of the week:

Clearco and Thinkific Labs are very different Canadian technology companies: one advances cash online to e-commerce operators. The latter sells a platform used to create and run online courses.

But they share one thing in common. Both were among the earlier companies last year to enact deep job cuts after tech valuations crashed and interest rates rose: Vancouver’s Thinkific cut 100 jobs, or 20 per cent of staff in March. Clearco (officially CFT Clear Finance Technology Corp.), based in Toronto, cut 125 jobs, or 25 per cent in July. Tech companies eventually laid off 154,000-plus workers globally in 2021.

Now, the two have cut deeply again – putting them at the vanguard of tech companies enacting a second sweeping reduction. Thinkific last week cut 21 per cent of staff, or 76 jobs. On Monday, Clearco said 50 people, or 26 per cent, were laid off and chief executive officer Michele Romanow had resigned to become co-executive chair. Other tech companies that have already done a big layoff are expected to follow their leads.

………

“We hired too quickly last year,” Ms. Romanow said in an interview. “We grew in too many markets, we were trying to build too many products.” Clearco’s job cuts this week affect all areas and levels and bring Clearco’s ranks to 140 people, from 500 last July.

Ms. Romanow, a star of TV’s Dragons’ Den, said the decision to step down was hers, 11 months after she had replaced co-founder Andrew D’Souza as CEO. “I told the board, ‘I think it’s time we have someone that knows and has operated in these economic conditions and has a wealth of experience in finance and capital markets so we do not make mistakes there.’ "

"Dragon's Den" is a Canadian version of Shark Tank, which kind of dots the "I"s and crosses the "T"s for a business model of pure puffery.

………

Clearco was a high flier early in the pandemic, reaching “unicorn” status in 2021 by achieving a valuation around US$2-billion. Japanese giant Softbank Group’s Vision 2 Fund led a US$215-million financing that year.

(Emphasis Mine)

But Clearco has been challenged since early 2022, starting with a slew of senior departures. Last summer, Clearco briefly stopped originating cash advances to increase pricing and tighten underwriting, enacted its first layoffs, and retreated from markets outside Canada and the U.S. It hired U.S. investment bank Financial Technology Partners to explore strategic options, a process that is continuing, and raised US$60-million in 2021. It is now raising US$30-million more.

………

Most of its advances came from off-balance-sheet facilities backed by alternative or specialty asset managers. Prospective customers didn’t have to provide personal guarantees, give up equity or submit to credit checks, but did have to give access to their business accounts to Clearco, which assessed their economics and made automated financing offers. Last fall, Clearco simplified and increasingly automated its product; it now funds specific expenditures based on uploaded invoices, and clients commit to fixed repayment periods.

"Off balance sheet facilities?" sounds like a little Enron.

Why is Masayoshi Son not in prison?

Linkage

• Humans Still Have The Genes For a Full Coat of Fur, Scientists Discover (ScienceAlert) Not a surprise for the Saroff family, my dad, my older brother, and I are Wookies.
  
• Surgeon removes 'live grenade' from inside Ukrainian soldier's body - War Is Boring Wicked bad day at the office. 
• F@*$#*! 2022 was a record year for earnings call swearing (Financial Times) What the fuck is up with that?
  
• The Story SPD's Retail Theft Operation Told: Shoplifters Are Poor (The Stranger) Seattle PD goons are pushing a narrative of an explosion in shop lifiting.  It's mostly poverty, and what is being taken is food and toilet paper.
• Josh Tepfer Pioneers Mass Exonerations For Wrongfully Convicted (Buzzfeed) Undoing decades or wrongdoing by the Chicago Police.
  
• Florida English teacher pushing book bans is openly racist and homophobic, students allege (Popular.Info) Not a shocker. 
• Video game studio called Proletariat declines to recognize union (lol) (Washington Post) Hypocrisy much?
  

 If I ever get to name a planet, I will call it Verm:

Good Point

One thing that improves coverage of local mass transit is to take steps to ensure that local press use the service.

Otherwise, all you get is horror stories:

This isn’t a particularly devastating article about the trials of Boston’s mass transit system, the MBTA (aka ‘the T’). It’s well-written, but what I find notable is the subject matter: it’s about service delays. When I lived in Boston, the Globe (and the Herald) focused on the typical mass transit stories: collisions, fires, and graft (oh my!). What they didn’t focus on, to the chagrin of actual riders, was performance (delays and overcrowded trains*).

Then the Globe moved to a new building, and a bunch of Globe employees, including editors and columnists, started to depend on the T. Lo and behold, the tenor of the coverage changed. Sure, they still covered the collisions, fires, and graft (oh my!), but they also focused on the crappy service–nobody likes showing up late to a meeting because the T crapped out.

The information of journalism from a craft to a degreed profession, with the attendant separation from the citizens that they cover, has not been a good thing.

Burn it With Fire

The original

The xkcd version from a few years back

A systems engineer who works on self-driving cars was being driven home by her boyfriend's dad in a Tesla.

She requested that autopilot not be used, and when he put on the driver assist, she demanded to be let off………  immediately ……… in the middle of the street if need by.

She requested this loudly, and dropped and swore profusely, and was wondering if she was being unreasonable.

She was not.

She followed up on her post explaining why she found Tesla's self driving is so profoundly alarming:

(disclaimer, this is my personal opinion and is not a statement on behalf of my current or past employers. This should not be taken to indicate any current or past employer's position.)

A number of companies are working on self driving tech. I have, and would, get into a number of their vehicles. Just not Teslas.

1. Many of the competing companies are at a similar level of technology development. However every other company is either... manning every vehicle with a highly trained safety driver / monitoring engineer pair who know the system inside out and is trained to avert emergencies, and is extremely focused. They usually take short (like 15 minute) shifts because it's hard to keep that extreme focus. Or..
   
   
2. Operating in a very very severely limited domain (in terms of location, weather, etc..) with 1:1 remote monitoring with a highly trained person monitoring every vehicle and able to intervene in a moment. These people also take short shifts. Or...
   
   
3. Operating away from people (I.E. hauling vehicles for mining operations, which do not use public roads and where the mine roads are laid out so no people are permitted on the autonomous hauling routes.

But tesla does not do any of that. They don't have trained safety drivers, live remote monitoring, or constrained operational domains. They don't limit how long a single person can operate the vehicle, despite widely accepted evidence on how focus degrades over time.

They have similar (or arguably worse) self driving technology to other companies. But while the other 30 or so companies in this space are being responsible for the safety of their vehicles with live monitoring, and trained engineer intervention, Tesla is just letting random consumers take on that role (and liability)

It's not a good place to be, as a consumer, to be doing the same dangerous job that other people are being paid 6 figures to do. Without training. For free. Hell, worse than free, you're paying to take on a corporation's liability.

This allows them to avoid paying for some of the usual research and development costs like safety drivers and live monitoring, and it also offloads a lot of liability of testing a very very new and unreliable technology from them as a corporation onto their consumers.

It also helps them appear "ahead" in technology development, while honestly under the hood, I'd say they're behind and simply appearing ahead because they're bypassing safety practices and engineering rigor that other companies are following.

For example, every time a driver claims FSD or Autopilot error, and Tesla claims driver error, that is a shifting of liability that the other companies in this space would not do. All the other companies take the liability of their technology failing on themselves.

Tesla is pushing liability onto the end-user and their insurance policies which are generally unequipped to handle claims regarding AV malfunction, and publicly denying any accusations of malfunction. However other companies developing similar tech are purchasing insurance themselves at very high rates, and being transparent with their insurers about the risks they're undertaking.

I don't see that as ethical, as they're pushing the danger and accident liability onto the consumer, at a very early stage of technology development. I also don't see that as safe for the consumer.

It's a joke in my field that if you pay for FSD, you're paying to be a crash test dummy...

Even if Elon were not an evil right wing asshole, his car company is profoundly anti-safety and anti-consumer, so buying a Tesla seems to be to be a fool's errand.

It's interesting that this systems engineer had exactly the same response as one gets from software folks over internet voting, as is so entertainingly shown by Randall Munroe.

And the Award for Coolest Lieutenant Governor Goes To

This is Aruna Miller, the soon to be Lt. Governor of Maryland. 

She posted some prospective official portraits to Twitter to get our opinions.

My friend @iamwesmoore gubernatorial portraits are dashing. Here are mine…BTW, I’m wearing the smile you all gave me.

Comment below with your favorite! pic.twitter.com/VG8dBivq81

— Aruna Miller (@arunamiller) January 13, 2023

I would like to see picture 4, but I also wanted that ship to be Boaty McBoatface.  This has about the same likelihood.

Epic.

This Explains a Lot

It happens to all men in long term relationships.

You are looking in the refrigerator for something, and you ask your significant other, "Honey, where is the (for example) ketchup?"

She replies, "On the door, bottom shelf," and you reply, "I already looked there, and ……… WTF?"

There it is, on the refrigerator door, the bottom shelf, but it was not when you looked earlier.

The ketchup was in the Woman's Secret Hiding Place, a sort of pocket dimension that is only accessible by women.

They hide things there, and taunt you with this.

I know that this does not sound logical, but it is, as Mt. Everest is, and Alma Cogan isn't.

Dungeons and Dragons Rat Fuckery

There has been an explosion of outrage over Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. changing their "Open Gaming License", which will have the effect of making their license.

Well, writing from his hot air balloon secret base, (Way cooler than S.H.I.E.L.D.'s helicarrier) Cory Doctorow observes something very interesting, that the license that they have issued is complete garbage in either the old or the new version, because it licenses things that are not subject to copyright.

While Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. can apply IP to things like the actual words used to write the rules, characters, names, places, etc, they cannot actually copyright the meaning of the rules.

Copyright covers expression, not ideas: (Some slight reformatting for prettier links)

Last week, Gizmodo's Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop –a leaked report of Hasbro's plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:

The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community – not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.

………

Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word "irrevocable." That means that if you build on licensed content, you don't have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It's rugproof.

Now, the OGL does not contain the word "irrevocable." Rather, the OGL is "perpetual." To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a "perpetual" license is one whose revocation doesn't come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is "irrevocable," the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.

FWIW, as Doctorow notes, this sort of rug pull is actually rather common.  For profits go from, "We encourage the community to create content," to, "Fuck you, pay me," as soon as they feel that they no longer need to that community's content.

Here is the important bit:

………

The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As gsllc@chirp.enworld.org – an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer – wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.

The issue lies with what the OGL actually licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is "intellectual property," and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.

The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn't work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?)

Copyright is a lot more complex than "anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it." For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not apply to ideas – the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically not copyrightable.

Copyright also doesn't cover abstract systems or methods – like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a "balanced" system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That's what "uncopyrightable" means.

………

Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC can't copyright – "the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines." In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things you don't need permission to use.

Things like specific characters, maps, dialogue, etc. are subject to copyright, but if you want to create a new character class, say for example a boomerang spoon thrower, you can do using dice, and levels, and experience point requirements for levels, etc. without permission, and you can sell it.

You could also create an app to calculate character stats and otherwise aid in game play, because the fact that hit points for a fighter use a D10 (in my day, they only got a D8, and we liked it, you kids) is not copyrightable.

The original (allegedly good) OGL never gave its users any rights, it took them away, albeit for free, and there is no reason for anyone to continue to use this license.

Just write and release your works, and maybe form a coop to deal with the nuisance suits that might come your way from Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc.

Thursday, and Jobless Claims Ain't the Lede

Yeah, inflation does seem to have moderated

So, it seems that Inflation is way down in December.

The Consumer Price Index been way down for the past 6 months, and the year over year has fallen to 6.5%, and for the less volatile core CPI has fallen to 5.7%, and the 3 month rolling average of core CPI has fallen to an annual rate of 3.1%.

One would expect the Federal Reserve to moderate their rate increases, but they are professional sadists, so I expect another 50 basis points (½%) at they next meeting.

I would note Larry Summers' statement that this would require a jump in unemployment is wrong, and that inflation appears to be, "Transient," ironically enough.

We did, however, also have last week's unemployment report, with initial claims falling slightly, down 1000 to 205,000, and continuing claims fell 63,000 to 1.63 million.

A lot of what happens in the next few months will depend on how securely the Federal Reserve Open Markets Committee is moored in reality.

I am not optimistic about this.

I Have an Endorsement

Grilling Pharma Executives


Grilling an oil executives

Katie Porter, who has announced that she will be running to replace Dianne Feinstein as California Senator in 2004.

This move is surprising,because Feinstein has not yet announced if she intends to run for reelection.

I don't think that she will, she will be 91 on election day, and there an increasing number of reports of diminished mental capacity, though the recent death of her husband Richard Blum might be a factor.

I enthusiastically endorse her, and I support her announcing before Feinstein has made a formal announcement, because she is never going to be the choice of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), and any formal announcement would likely be coordinated with Feinstein's preferred successor.

I have no problem whatsoever with her announcing before Feinstein did.

Porter has good progressive cred, and her take-downs people who try to feed her a line of bullshit, are beautiful to behold. (see attached videos)

I think that she would do a good job, particularly on economic issues.

Full disclosure, Dianne Feinstein is my second cousin once removed.  My great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

Headline of the Day

The Special Purpose Acquisition Company Fallout Is Going to Be SPAC-Tacular

—Financial Times

SPACs were supposed to be the latest major financial innovation.

What they really were was regulatory arbitrage (Fraud) masquerading as innovation:

Last year may have been an annus horribilis for the IPO market, but it was an annus calamitosas for special purpose acquisition companies, or Spacs.

Spacs are blank-cheque vehicles designed as a backdoor way for a private company to list on the stock exchange without going through the expense and uncertainty of an initial public offering. But things have gone pear-shaped.

For one thing, investors have suffered bone-crushing losses, as companies merging with Spacs (inelegantly known as a “de-Spac transaction”) have vastly underperformed the stock market. The AXS De-Spac ETF fell almost 75 per cent in 2022. Several companies have missed their forecasts, restated their financials and even gone bankrupt. SPACs have in some cases incubated a unicorn-to-penny stock lifecycle — with companies having to launch reverse splits to avoid delisting.

………

And finally, as often happens when people lose a lot of money, lawsuits and investigations are in the offing. Aggrieved investors claim that Spac founders had a conflict of interest in pushing through a merger, and as a result skimped on due diligence, inflated forecasts and failed to disclose important business risks. Naturally, the SEC is revving its enforcement engines.

SPACs were always a scam.  They were created as a way of going public without doing proper disclosures. 

Not This Shit Again!

Now the cable networks are acting like the discovery of classified documents in Biden's old offices is the biggest scandal since Watergate.

Clearly there was some mishandling of documents, but it was 10 documents, not boxes, and once discovered, it was promptly reported, and the documents were promptly turned over to the National Archives.

This does not mean that someone might have mishandled classified documents, and that is potentially a big deal, but the FBI did not have to raid Joe Biden's offices to get the documents back:

After serving as Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years, Joe Biden did what high-profile former politicians so often do: He set up a think tank at a prominent university.

Biden’s was called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania. But unlike other elected officials and other such institutions, Biden’s engagement with the Penn Biden Center was soon back-burnered. By April 2019, he was a candidate for the presidency.

In November, almost exactly two years after Biden’s election, attorneys for the president were emptying an office at the center when, according to their account, they discovered about 10 documents bearing classification markings. The next day, the documents were turned over to the National Archives. The Justice Department is now reviewing them.

………

At this point, we don’t know much about the Biden documents beyond what his team has made public, which is certainly an important caveat. According to the Biden team’s statement, the documents were found in a locked closet and quickly turned over to the government. What they contain is unclear, as is their current classification level or status. (There are, of course, numerous existing documents that are no longer classified but which may nonetheless still carry classification markings.) One person, tongue presumably in cheek, told CBS News that the documents did not contain nuclear secrets.

We know a bit more about the Trump documents. We know that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago turned up dozens of documents with classification markings in multiple locations around the facility. We know that one box alone in Trump’s office at the event facility, a room where he regularly entertained guests, held more than a dozen documents.

We also know that the seizure of those documents came only after a lengthy effort to secure documents (both classified and nonclassified) that were produced during his presidency and were therefore government property. The investigation into Trump’s documents was triggered in May 2021 when the National Archives contacted Trump’s team about documents it knew existed but were not in its possession. (The country’s archivist, watching Trump leave the White House the previous January, later mentioned wondering what was in the boxes Trump’s staff was loading into Marine One.) Over the next few months, the Archives and Trump’s team went back and forth on taking possession of the material.

So the information we have at this point is that documents were found that had classification markings, but we do not know whether they were still classified, they kept in a secure location, and when discovered, they were promptly turned over to the National Archives.

At this point, it should be a page 1 below the fold story, but the cable networks leading with this, CNN spent about ¼ of their air time on this from 5 pm to 11 pm, for example, is nuts.

They should be flooding the zone with this with reporters, not mindlessly speculating on air.

One of These Things Is Not like the Other

Unlike Merrick "Slow Walk" Garland, authorities in Brazil are already looking into who bankrolled the riots in Brazil.

Meanwhile, nothing but crickets regarding who bankrolled the January 6 2021 insurrection.

No one has been following the money in the United States, or flipping lower level perps: 

Brazilian authorities on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for two government security officials, zeroed in on people suspected of funding this week’s violent protests and asked a federal court to freeze the assets of the far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro, a broad expansion of the investigation into the invasion of Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices by protesters on Sunday.

(emphasis mine)

You might notice that none of this has happened in the United States.

The moves showed that, a day after arresting hundreds of people suspected of taking part in Sunday’s riot in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, the nation’s top officials have now turned their focus to the political and business elites suspected of inspiring, organizing or aiding the rioters.

You might notice that none of this has happened in the United States. 

Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, issued the warrants for the two security officials, including Anderson Torres, the man effectively in charge of security for the capital, in response to a request by the federal police.

You might notice that none of this has happened in the United States. 

………

Authorities are also expected to take action against more than 100 companies thought to have helped the protesters, including many believed to have transported rioters to the capital or to have provided them with free food and shelter, according to Brazilian media reports.

Brazil’s new justice minister, Flávio Dino, said government investigators had zeroed in on companies in at least 10 states that were suspected of having helped finance the riots. Authorities were seeking arrest warrants for “people who did not come to Brasília, but who participated in the crime, who are organizers, financiers,” Mr. Dino said on Tuesday.

You might notice that none of this has happened in the United States.  

There might be a theme in all of this.

What the Fuck?

In great moments in MBA management there cannot me much that tops Southwest Airlines promoting the executives responsible for their catastrophic meltdown in December.

I guess that being an MBA means never having to say you're sorry.

Seriously, there is a reason that our pampered elites are incompetent, they can only fail up:

In the wake of a Christmas meltdown that saw it cancel some 16,700 flights, one would expect heads to roll at Southwest Airlines, but that's not the case.

Instead, several of the company's leaders - including the VP in charge of planning its aircraft network - are being promoted.

Southwest announced a quintet of leadership promotions Monday that it said are part of structural changes that began last September and which "will strengthen our operational execution and better serve our people and customers."

The most notable promotion is going to Adam Decaire, SWA's former vice president of network planning, who is now the company's senior veep of network nlanning and Network Operations Control (NOC).


SWA describes its NOC as "the heart for major operational decisions and coordination," which includes employees like dispatchers, meteorologists, crew schedulers and others who keep its network of planes moving smoothly ... usually.

Southwest said Decaire's promotion "creates a tighter feedback loop between schedule design and schedule execution while adding resiliency and reliability to the network," and said he has championed the design and deployment of new technologies and solutions for network planning at SWA.

Seriously?  These guys are getting fucking promotions?

Can you say death spiral?  Good, I knew you could.

Not This Shit Again

Once again, the FDA has approved a ruinously expensive Alzheimer's treatment based on dubious clinical data.

At this point, I have to figure that some senior folks at the FDA have a pecuniary interest in these products: 

The future of a new Alzheimer’s drug is unclear, even as the Food and Drug Administration granted fast-track approval to the treatment Friday afternoon.

The drug, which will be sold under the brand name Leqembi and priced at $26,500 per year, moderately slowed cognitive decline for patients with early stages of the disease. But some doctors and experts have been skeptical of the treatment, uncertain about its safety and whether it provides a substantial benefit.

Just so you know, the cost of $26,500.00 is  NOT a misplaced decimal point. 

………

This new dynamic comes in the shadow of intense criticism over the FDA’s decision in June 2021 to give fast-track approval to Aduhelm, a different drug developed by the same two companies, Eisai and Biogen. The debates over Alzheimer’s drugs have been particularly fraught as advocates push for treatments for a devastating disease that levies a harsh toll on patients and their loved ones.

Aduhelm showed no evidence of effectiveness at delaying cognitive decline, it just showed a reduction in plaques, which were thought, but have never been proven, to cause the disease, but increasingly seem to be a symptom.

………

The accelerated approval for Leqembi was based on a mid-stage trial that showed the treatment effectively removed a sticky protein from the brain, which is considered a hallmark of the illness. More recently, a larger trial found the drug — which is given intravenously twice a month — slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s by 27 percent, our colleague Laurie McGinley reports.

………

At least this one shows some positive results, though I'd bet dollars to navy beans that there was some manipulation of the study sample.

But others argue the risks outweigh the benefits. There are concerns over complications, such as swelling and bleeding in the brain. Such concerns have increased after Science and Stat reported that three patients died in incidents potentially linked to the drug, though the company’s CEO says he remains “confident of the safety profile” of the drug.

So, it makes your brain explode.  That can't be good. 

Seriously, has the FDA learned nothing from the Aduhelm fiasco?

Support Your Local Police

There have been about 5000 lynchings in the history of the United States since the end of the Civil War. (Numbers on this vary)

Police killed ⅓ that number just last year.

There is something seriously wrong with law enforcement in the US:

US law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, making it the deadliest year on record for police violence since experts first started tracking the killings, a new data analysis reveals.

Police across the country killed an average of more than three people a day, or nearly 100 people every month last year according to Mapping Police Violence. The non-profit research group maintains a database of reported deaths at the hands of law enforcement, including people fatally shot, beaten, restrained and Tasered.

The preliminary 2022 total – a possible undercount as more cases are catalogued – marks 31 additional fatalities than the year before. In 2021, police killed 1,145 people; 1,152 in 2020; 1,097 in 2019; 1,140 in 2018; and 1,089 in 2017. The earliest data goes back to 2013, when advocates began counting these fatal incidents. A database run by the Washington Post, which tracks fatal shootings by police, also shows 2022 as a year with record killings.

The data release comes two years after the murder of George Floyd sparked national uprisings calling for racial justice, police accountability and reductions in the funding and size of police forces. Despite the international attention and some local efforts to curb police brutality, there has been an intensifying backlash to criminal justice reform, and the overall number of killings has remained alarmingly high.

“It just never stops,” said Bianca Austin, aunt of Breonna Taylor, whose March 2020 killing in Kentucky sparked mass protests. “There was a movement and uproar across the globe, and we’re still having more killings? What are we doing wrong? It’s so disheartening.”

As to what needs to be done to prevent this?  I would suggest that a good first step would not to train new police to be live in psychopathic pants wetting terror of the people that they are supposed to protect and serve.

Police training in the America trains cops to see a lethal attacker behind every bush, and not only does it foment violence, but it is a recipe for creating PTSD.

Beyond that, limits on overtime, and limits on moonlighting, would help as well, because a sleep deprived man with a gun and authority to use it is clearly not beneficial for anyone.

Tweet of the Day

OH MY GOD FINALLY SOMEONE HACKED THIS DUMB AS HELL IDEA https://t.co/WBWc7hYiTE

— Internet of Shit (@internetofshit) January 10, 2023

Yep.  Digital internet collected license plates, what could possibly go wrong?

I Screwed Up

I have been using the word, "Polity," a lot lately, and it appears that I am using it wrong.

I have been using it as a word to describe the consensus culture of a political establishment.

So, for example, if Democrats and Republicans agree on something, that senior officials should be exempt for their criminal acts, I used the term, "Polity,"  to describe the consensus political position.

In fact, polity means a government or some similar governmental or bureaucratic entity, not a social class, as I had been using it.

I could use the term, "Body Politic," but I would prefer something more pithy, if my reader(s) have any suggestions, it would be appreciated.

Of course I made a Princess Bride reference.  Trust me on this, any time that you fail to make a Princess Bride reference, you'll regret it.  Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life. (Just so you know, the same applies to Casablanca, and Monty Python, of course.)

Linkage

• Ponzi Hospitals and Counterfeit Capitalism (Matt Stoller) Ruminations on the Ponzi economy.
• A New Computer Proof ‘Blows Up’ Centuries-Old Fluid Equations (Wired) Euler (Pronounced Oiler, not Ewwler) equations
• Henry Ford, Elon Musk, and the Dark Path to Extremism (The Intercept)  The parallels are striking.
• Why Movements Need to Start Singing Again (In These Times) On the relationship between music and protests.
• A Video Shows NYPD Officers Allowing Members Of The Proud Boys To Ride The Subway Without Paying After Protesting A Drag Event (Buzzfeed) Have I mentioned that the police are objectively pro-Nazi?  (Spoiler, I have mentioned this before)
• Edward Norton is direct descendant of Pocahontas, records confirm (The Guardian) This is a bit surreal.
• 2022 Was the Year the Overconfidence Man Fell Back to Earth (Business Insider) Musk, Truss, RBG, etc.
• #ReceptioGate and the (absolute) state of academia (Charlotte Gauthier; The Critic Magazine) This is a fairly exhaustive account of academic fraud in the highly profile (not) field of Medieval manuscript provenance. (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")
• Market-Trading Surge Before US CPI Inflation Report Was ‘Extremely Unusual’ (Bloomberg) Someone in the Labor or Treasury Departments is giving advance information to their friends.
• Pigeon caught in Canadian prison yard with drugs (Daily Sabah) Smuggling drugs by carrier pigeons.  That is old school gangsta.

Have some music:

Speaking of Reruns

Same as it ever was

Whack-job right winger Paulina Luna is now publicly challenging the accusation that she is a witch. (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")

You may recall that in 2010, there were allegations that Delaware Republican Senate Candidate Christine O'Donnell had practice witchcraft, and she took out campaign ads to deny this.

We are seeing it yet again.

I am begging someone who actually practices witchcraft to run for Congress for the next cycle.  It would be bad for your party and your movement to be associated with the Republican Party:

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna came to Congress on her first day in office ready to do battle—not just with Democrats, but also with her own party, as she became one of the 20 Republicans to vote against electing Kevin McCarthy speaker.

But back home in her conservative Florida district, Luna is waging a very different kind of war: a legal fight with political enemies who say she is a literal witch.

A letter obtained by The Daily Beast reveals that the Florida Republican retained the high-powered law firm Holland & Knight to go after a would-be rival who leveled a series of outlandish allegations against Luna on the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show in the fall.

The letter demands that Matt Tito, a pal of Roger Stone who mulled challenging Luna in a primary, apologize on video for his accusations, which include claims that Luna was fired from a job—and that she had a sexual liaison with Rep. Matt Gaetz.

“While it is extraordinarily odd for any person to say these things, let alone a former Captain in the United States Marine Corps., that is not the purpose of this communication,” attorney David J. Lisko wrote in the Oct. 7 missive.

“I am sending you this letter because of the defamatory statements you made about Ms. Luna on the Show,” Lisko wrote, adding that Tito knew his comments were untrue or were “said in gross negligence knowing the statements were highly implausible and unlikely to be true.”

“You said that Ms. Luna (a devout Christian) practices witchcraft,” Lisko added.

“You are hereby demanded to publicly and immediately retract each and every defamatory statement you made about Ms. Luna on the show,” Lisko continued. “Because you do not have the ability to distribute your retraction widely on your social media, you are demanded to apologize and retract your statements on the Bubba the Love Sponge Show or by making a retraction and apology video that you send to me that Ms. Luna will distribute via her social media.”

Am I the only one who thinks that her lawyer had to turn is head every time he had to write, "Bubba the Love Sponge," because he was laughing so hard that he risked shorting out his keyboard with his spittle.

Of course for the allegations of an affair with Matt Gaetz, I assume that the lawyer needed a good supply of Dramamine.

Tweet of the Day

Larry Summers reclining on a tropical island and instructing the proles that "there's going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation" ☠️pic.twitter.com/t1ONYePsUZ

— David Adler (@davidrkadler) January 6, 2023

This is the most Larry Summers thing ever.

I've Seen this Show Before

And I did not like it, not one little bit.

In Brazil, we are seeing yet another right wing riot culminating with a takeover of government buildings.

It looks like the usual suspects, including Steve Bannon, were tied up in all of this: (Link)

The attack — the most significant threat to democracy in Latin America’s largest nation since the 1964 military coup — came a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to succeed Bolsonaro. It suggested a spreading plague of far-right disrupters in Western democracies, as hard-liners radicalized by incendiary political rhetoric refuse to accept election losses, cling to unfounded claims of fraud and undermine the rule of law.

Bolsonaristas occupied the congress building, many of them sitting or lying on the ground. A flag placed in front of the building read “intervention” — a reference to calls for the military to depose Lula, who defeated Bolsonaro in October.

………

Police in the capital meanwhile appeared to relax security measures that had been imposed for inauguration day. Anderson Torres, the secretary of public security in the Brasília Federal District, was Bolsonaro’s justice minister. On Sunday, he condemned the rioters on Twitter, but was fired by the state governor. Brazilian media reported that Torres was in Florida, but he said he was not with Bolsonaro. The Post could not independently confirm his whereabouts.

………

Later Sunday, the president’s legal team called on the Supreme Court to issue a warrant for Torres’s arrest, and demanded an investigation into the organization of the riots on social media. They called on cellular phone companies to keep records so geolocation could be used to identify rioters. They demanded the investigation and prosecution of all involved, including any members of the police. Ibaneis Rocha, governor of the Brasília Federal District, tweeted Sunday night that at least 400 people had been detained.

………

The incident amounted to another uncanny parallel between Bolsonaro and Trump, his political lodestar. Pundits have warned for months of the possibility of a Jan. 6-style action here. For months before the election, Bolsonaro called Lula a corrupt “thief” and claimed without evidence that Brazil’s electronic voting machines were untrustworthy. Since his loss, he has condemned violent protest, but called the election result unfair and encouraged the protest camps outside military installations.

Yeah, "Uncanny Parallels," like having the same organizers.

This is a dress rehearsal for the next time in the United States, or maybe the UK, or Sweden, or Germany, or Japan.

I'm not sure what can be done to stop this once and for all, but a good first step would be to find and identify right wing extremists at all levels of the state security apparatus, whether in the US, Brazil, or wherever, and purge them from their positions.

Today in Republican Family Values

Right wing fixture, organizer of the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot in 2001, and Trump loving MAGAt Matt Schlapp has been accused of sexually harassing and sexually assaulting a (male) Herschel Walker staffer.

It should be noted that Schlapp is married, and has been involved in many anti-LGBTQ initiatives.

Seriously, is it all just projection for these folks: (Spoiler, yes, it is)

A staffer for Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign has alleged to The Daily Beast that longtime Republican activist Matt Schlapp made “sustained and unwanted and unsolicited” sexual contact with him while the staffer was driving Schlapp back from an Atlanta bar this October.

The staffer said the incident occurred the night of Oct. 19, when Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union and lead organizer for the influential Conservative Political Action Conference, “groped” and “fondled” his crotch in his car against his will after buying him drinks at two different bars.

The staffer described Schlapp, who had traveled to Georgia for a Walker campaign event, as inappropriately and repeatedly intruding into his personal space at the bars. He said he was also keenly aware of his “power dynamic” with Schlapp, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in national conservative politics.

File a police report. His grabbing your crotch is sexual assault.

This reminds me of what Francis Wilhoit, the composer, not the political scientist, once said, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Well, That Was Fun(ny) While It Lasted

Late last night, while I was asleep, Kevin "The Incredible Shrinking Speaker" McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House.

Expect 2 years of chaos and incompetence:

Confident that he was about to win the speaker’s gavel after a torturous four-day stretch of defeats, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California sat grinning late Friday night in his chair on the House floor. Then his face dropped.

………

The final hours of Mr. McCarthy’s ultimately triumphant struggle for the speakership featured back-room dealing with the hard right and arm-twisting out in the open; phone calls from Donald J. Trump, the twice-impeached former president, to try to win over holdouts; haggling over how the House would operate in the coming two years; and even a narrowly avoided physical altercation inside the chamber.

………

“That was easy, huh?” Mr. McCarthy said after finally taking the gavel just after 1 a.m. “I never thought we’d get up here.”

Over the last century, the negotiating and deal-cutting that have paved the way for the ascendance of new House speakers have typically played out behind closed doors and far ahead of the actual election; no speaker designate had needed more than one ballot to be elected since 1923. Instead, on Friday, much of the charged 11th-hour negotiations was televised in real time for all to see.

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At around the same time, Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, who is in line to become the next chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had to be physically restrained by another lawmaker who clapped his hand over Mr. Rogers’s open mouth after the irate congressman approached Mr. Gaetz.

“We haven’t seen this in a century,” said Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, referencing the last time a speaker election dragged out past nine ballots. “We’re in an emotional climate to begin with, absent this, before we got here. It’s emotions running high.”

………

On the next ballot — the 15th and final — Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Boebert cast the same “present” votes, signaling they did not support Mr. McCarthy but reducing the number of votes he would need to win a majority. The last of the holdouts — Mr. Biggs, Mr. Rosendale, and Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona and Bob Good of Virginia — fell in line and also changed their votes to “present,” allowing Mr. McCarthy to become speaker.

“Matt really wanted to get everybody there,” Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. Gaetz during an informal news conference later in the night. “Through all of this people’s emotions go up and down, and at the end of the night, Matt got everybody there.”

Both Mr. McCarthy’s allies and the rebels have remained tight-lipped about what exactly prompted the last group of defectors to change their votes between the 14th and 15th ballots.

We'll find out soon enough.

It is pretty clear that we are going levels of dysfunction in this Congress that will make John Boehner's tenure as speaker look like a walk in the park.